Mr. Kenyatta, you condemn Israeli’s behaviour towards Palestinians and ask, when does criticism of Israel become antisemitism? That you empathize with Palestinians seems as natural as rain to me. That some people would try to turn your empathy into antisemitism is as wrong as wrong can be. That said, I put no stock in anything white Christians have to say about “others.” While I suspect you do the same, it’s harder than it seems.
I have no way of knowing what you do and do not know about Jews, or Israel, or where you learned what you do know; nor will I assume upon you. However, I do know that after World War two, Jews were silenced, while their experience of the Holocaust was bleached beyond recognition.
Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m projecting, but I see far too many parallels between this moment in history, and the one that began after the civil war. What I see and hear happening to black people who are speaking out and telling us their stories, is way too familiar to ignore. I cannot watch and remain silent. All I can do is offer some insight into how Jews were silenced. Maybe, just maybe, this insight will prove worthwhile.
If you are like most Americans, the white Christianized version of the Holocaust is all you’ve ever heard. In public schools, the Holocaust is the only part of more than 4,000 years of well-documented history that American students ever hear about Jews.
White Christians reconstruct racism and antisemitism to suit their ambitions. Just about 10 years ago, white Christian’s “Holocaust Jew” no longer served its purpose, and white conservative movement leaders resurrected the ancient stereotype and turned George Soros into the stand-in for all Jews. White Christians had grown so bored with “their Holocaust Jews”, they were glad to have their familiar Nazi stereotype back. Today, 92-year-old George Soros symbolizes the Jew that white Christians love to hate; the wealthy Jew, the Jews who run the world, and the Jew that white preachers rail against from their pulpits (the dirty Jews who killed their white Christ).
But let’s leave white Christian’s “Soros” Jew for another time and talk about white Christian’s “Holocaust Jew” (the one they teach in public schools).
When World War two ended, Europe was in chaos. By the mid-1950s, things had settled down and Holocaust survivors began to seek publishers for their stories. White Christians quickly turned The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel’s Night into their very own Holocaust story. In one fell swoop 2,000 years of white Christian persecution of Jews had been erased, and the Holocaust was turned into a story about white Christians, “saviors” of the Jews.
By “Christianizing” Holocaust survivors, white Christians had created Jews they could identify with, even care about and forgot all about American industrialists’ and politicians’ complicity in the Holocaust. A lot of white Christians got so uppity and self-righteous about “their Jews” they resurrected the term Judeo-Christian (and adopted the new identity for themselves). For the rest of the century, the most American students would ever learn about Jewish history, would come from one of 2 books (Night, or The Diary of Anne Frank).
I know this is getting long, but stay with me, please, for I honestly believe, we are in the midst of another re-construction project. Just as American industrialists re-constructed racism after the civil war and called it “eugenics” their so-called “scientific racism” is being re-constructed for our time. We cannot afford to let this happen, again. Somehow, we must destroy racism and antisemitism – not reconstruct it. In my mind, that’s what America’s so-called “Culture War” is all about.
Among white Christians, Anne Frank is the best-known Jewish victim of the Holocaust, but I refuse to bring a child into these discussions. Until George Soros, the most famous Holocaust survivors were the author, Elie Wiesel and the unrelenting Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal.
Simon Wiesenthal has always made sense to me. He answered my longing for justice and my belief in the power of amends. My children think I like vigilante films a little too much – they are right.
Elie Wiesel, however, made no sense to me at all (as I’ve said to you before, I have no use for forgiveness). In one of my college papers, I wrote Wiesel was calculated and political. When our Rabbi asked if I meant Wiesel lacked authenticity, I said yes, something was off, Night didn’t feel right (to me). Our Rabbi did his Rabbi thing, and suggested I keep an open mind, someday I might see Wiesel’s calculations did not make him a disingenuous man.
The years passed, then the decades passed.
And then, in 2016… by then the search had been going on for years… Wiesel had asked Dr. Rapell to find the original manuscript… Rapell spent years sifting through more than a million documents stored in the Wiesel archives... and suddenly, there it was: The original manuscript for Night - 806 pages written in Yiddish, by then 26-year-old Elie Wiesel. Upon finding the manuscript, Rappel felt elation, but also grief. It had taken so long to find the manuscript, 87-year-old Elie Wiesel was gone – he'd died 60 days earlier.
As Rapell told the story to Haaretz, Wiesel had asked him to find the original manuscript, because he had intended to publish it in Hebrew. Rapell explained, “This is the version of ‘Night’ that Wiesel wanted the Israeli reader to see. He didn’t write it for anyone else. Wiesel knew that many Holocaust survivors from Auschwitz and Buchenwald, as well as many Jews living in Israel, would read this version, and so he put more emphasis on the Jewish aspect.”
Continuing to quote from Haaretz… “In his 1995 memoir “All Rivers Run Into the Sea,” Wiesel described the process of writing “Night”:
Wiesel…. “I worked in my cabin for most of the journey. I wrote feverishly, with shortness of breath, without rereading. The pages piled up on my bed. I slept fitfully. I didn’t participate in the activities onboard, and I typed incessantly on my little portable typewriter, ignoring my fellow passengers, concerned only that we would get there too soon.”
Wiesel was then 26. A decade before, he was being tossed between life and death in the Nazi camps, where he lost his mother and one of his sisters to the gas chamber, then watched his father beaten to death. At this point, he decided to break the vow of silence he had taken upon himself and “to open up the gates of memory,” as he put it.”
Memory is a form of revenge, and Wiesel made his hunger for revenge inescapably clear. In 1956, Wiesel published this work in Argentina, in an abridged, 254-page version in Yiddish with the title “And the World Remained Silent.”
Two years later, an even shorter version was published in France. This shorter version, a mere 158 pages, titled Night, is the one that made Wiesel famous. Night was translated into 35 languages and became mandatory reading on the Holocaust in schools around the world. In 2006, another generation was exposed to it after Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club in 2006 (Night hit #1 on Amazon the next day).
WTF happened? How did “And the World Remained Silent” become Night?
François Mauriac is what happened. Mauriac was one of France’s great authors and had received the 1952 Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1957, Elie Wiesel, now home from South America, was still working as a reporter for a French newspaper and had interviewed Mauriac on assignment. During the interview, Mauriac told Wiesel about “the image of cattle cars filled with Jewish children at the Austerlitz train station,” and Wiesel told him, “I was one of them.” According to Wiesel, Mauriac told him, “Please listen to an old man like me: We must talk – we also need to talk,…” - and so was born “Night” the 158-page, abridged version of “And the World Remained Silent.”
If I try to write this myself, every other word will be fuck. Best let Ron Rosenbaum tell it.
In Wiesel’s own words: “Three men are to be hanged. They are to stand on chairs and heavy nooses hung from a gallows draped over their heads. At a certain point the chairs are kicked out from under them and they strangle to death. The beginning didn’t take long: Both adults were already dead. The nooses had choked them at once. Instantly they expired. Their extended tongues were red as fire.
Only the slight Jewish child with the most dreamy eyes was still alive; his body weighed too little. Was too light [to die from strangulation with his own weight]. The noose didn’t “catch.” The slower death … took thirty-five minutes. And we saw him wobbling, swaying on the rope with his bluish red tongue extended, with a prayer on his gray-white lips, a prayer to God, to the Angel of Death ,to take pity on him to take his soul … liberate it from its death throes from the torment of the grave. When we saw him like that, the hanged child, many of us didn’t want to, couldn’t keep from crying.
Where is God?
Something in me [Wiesel] wanted to answer: “here He is hanging on the gallows….””
RR… This is an astonishingly radical line. The slow death of the boy was the death of God! This is not the voice of the ecumenical Elie Wiesel who makes it possible to envision post-Holocaust peace and resumption of worship. This is—take it or leave it—God is dead. His god, faith in God is dead. Brutally hanged to death. It may indeed be the very first incarnation of what was to be a postwar meme: the death of God.
In a passage describing a conversation a little while later on Rosh Hashanah, the New Year in which Jews are to be written or not to be written in the book of life, Wiesel wants to write God in the book of death:
Wiesel again… “Why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves. Because He kept six crematoria working day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days? Because in His great might … he had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna and so many other factories of death?”
RR… The entire post-Holocaust critique of God is there in the capital-H letters of that pained passage. God: He “created Auschwitz.” He “kept six crematoria working.” He “caused thousands of children to burn.” He is God. God is Hitler.
This is not the Elie Wiesel François Mauriac wanted to see. And so he did two things.
In effect, he [Mauriac] offered what Wiesel might not have realized was a Faustian bargain. “Yes, I’ll translate it and get it published and make sure the world pays attention. But I will denature, defang, diminish it by turning it into a Christian allegory that exalts my version of God. Not the god Wiesel depicted as Hitler but Mauriac’s “god of love.”
He even exposes this shabby trick for us. Here is what Mauriac wrote at the close of his five-page long [5 whole pages in a 158 page book!!!!] foreword to his translation of Night:
Mauriac, in his 5-page forward… “And I who believe that God is love, what answer was there to give [the young Wiesel] whose eyes still held the reflection of the angelic sadness that had appeared on the face of hanged child. What did I say to him?
“Did I speak to him about that other Jew [Christ], this crucified brother who perhaps resembled him and whose cross conquered the world”?
RR… That other Jew! Whose death made it all worthwhile, you know. Because “God is love.” Your God, maybe, Mauriac. Did the cross of Jesus really “conquer the world”? If so, why the Holocaust at all? Because somehow it was necessary to kill millions of Jews to fulfill Christian theology?
Mon dieu, François. In your backhanded way, this is an admission that you tried to take advantage of the wretched pain and anguish of young Wiesel to convert the abjectly sorrowful young man who believed he had been abandoned by the God of his fathers. Convert him to your equally unfeeling God, Jesus, this supposed God of love who also had no problem observing the murder of a million children—or was it a million and a half—with satanic equanimity.
Mauriac again…. “Did I explain to him that what had been a stumbling block for his father [Wiesel’s father] had become a cornerstone for mine?”
RR… Why yes, I think you did, you treacherous, mendacious sophist. You made it all about you, didn’t you, and saving a justification for your belief? The Holocaust was a major lift for your spirituality; those Jews died to invigorate your Christ worship.
And then Mauriac resorts to the phrase, to the theodicy, invoked by all such charlatans—including many contemporary Jewish rabbis—who attempt to excuse their God’s tolerance of evil:
Mauriac … “[Did I explain] that the connection between the cross and human suffering remains in my view the key to the unfathomable mystery in which the faith of his childhood was lost? … All is grace.”
RR… Thanks for nothing, Frenchy. Yes, nobody, no one, no God to blame. Just “unfathomable mystery” a pillar of dust behind which the guilty charlatans hide their shame.
And yet this mendacious sophistry is what served to universalize, Christianize, Wiesel’s suffering. Transmute the blood of the Jews into new vitality for the myth of Christian redemption.
Mauriac’s Wiesel gave us a Holocaust for everyone. The Jews were Jesus suffering for all mankind. We owe them gratitude, but the real gratitude belong to Jesus. Rob Elie Wiesel of the source of his grief and give it to the other brother [Christ]. And it worked.
Mauriac’s 5-page foreword remained in the book. It’s in there now. He validated Mauriac’s premise that the Holocaust was cause for spiritual renewal not just for Jews but for everyone. Jesus saves. Get over it Jews, get over yourself with your “crucified brother [Christ].”
The archived version of “Night” is hugely different to the published one. It contains entire sections that don’t appear in the finished book, as well as different versions of pieces that were included.
As well as the sharp criticism of God, the archived version also included harsh criticism of many Jews who either yielded to temptation or were tempted to believe that nothing bad would befall them. Wiesel settles accounts with those among his people who shut their eyes and ears to what was happening, and blames them for paving the Nazis’ way to committing their horrors. He calls them “false prophets.”
Wiesel… “Eternal optimists it would not be an exaggeration on my part if I were to say that they greatly helped the genocidal nation to prepare the psychological background for the disaster,” he writes, adding, “In fact, the professional optimists meant to make the present easier, but in doing so they buried the future. It is almost certain that if we had known only a little of the truth – dozens of Jews or more would have successfully fled. We would have broken the sword of fate. We would have burned the murderers’ altar. We would have fled and hidden in the mountains with farmers.”
RR… [Wiesel] also reserves criticism for the Jewish leadership, both in Palestine and globally.
Wiesel… “We didn’t know a thing [in Europe], while they knew in the Land of Israel, and they knew in London, and they knew in New York. The world was silent and the Jewish world was silent. Why silent? Why did it not find it vital to inform us of what was going on in Germany? Why did they not warn us? Why? I also accuse the Jewish world and its leaders for not warning us, at least about the danger awaiting us in ambush so that we’d seek rescue routes.”
RR… [Wiesel] also describes at length his Christian-Hungarian neighbors, who joyously watched the Jews of his hometown being deported.
Wiesel… “All the residents stood at the entrances of their homes, with faces filled with happiness at the misfortune they saw in their friends of yesterday walking and disappearing into the horizon – not for a day or two, but forever. Here I learned the true face of the Hungarian. It is the brutal face of an animal. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I were to say the Hungarians were more violent toward us than the Germans themselves. The Germans tended to shoot Jews.”
RR… Wiesel also discusses his desire for revenge that arose in 1945.
Wiesel… “At the end of the war, I refused to return to my hometown because I didn’t want to see any more the faces they revealed behind their disguises on that day of expulsion,” he writes. “However, from one perspective, I am sorry I didn’t return home, at least for a few days, in order to take revenge – to avenge the experts of hypocrisy, the inhabitants of my town. Then it would have been possible to take revenge!”
RR… It’s fascinating to compare what Wiesel originally wrote with what appears in the final, softened version. Take, for example, the archived version revealing that originally Wiesel wrote an additional passage about sexual relations among those being transported in the cattle cars to Auschwitz. [Wiesel] wrote in detail in the archived text:
Wiesel… “Under the cover of night, there were some young boys and girls who had sexual intercourse. The initial impact of the disaster was sexual. The tension of the final days sparked the desires that now sought release. And the heat also added its own touch, so that the sexual scenes did not provoke protest in the carriage. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”
RR… Mauriac removed these passages, and edited, revised, cut or removed many other passages as well…
The eliminated passages are the one’s Jews needed the most. They needed to know they were not alone. They needed to know that their rage, anger, resentment, and hunger for vengeance were as G-d given as their will to survive.
Unfortunately, Mauriac’s message was crystal clear. White Christians find Jewish rage unsettling; Jews will be spared Christian wrath, only if they behave. Jews heard the message and stuffed their rage inside and when they choked on it, even more died.
Mr. Kenyatta, after World War 2, the United States and its allies assuaged their guilt and shame, and hid their complicity, by forcing the defeated Germans to undergo a De-Nazification process designed to rid German and Austrian society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of the Nazi ideology – and pay reparations to Jews.
When all was said and done, Elie Wiesel had gotten his revenge; he had shamed the world. White Christians don’t get to use the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Act as shields anymore. In the heart of Democracy, Wiesel’s memory and his revenge live on, in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. To the south, near the largest slave auction site in the country, Bryan Stevenson, founding father of the Legacy Museum carries on the work.
The time has come to rid white American society, culture, press, economy, judiciary and politics of white supremacy ideology – and pay reparations to African and Native Americans.
If white Christians want to help, they can start by evangelizing to themselves, learning the Ten Commandments and leaving the rest of us alone. It sure would be nice to see more white Christians in America. Until then, carry on Mr. Kenyatta, your voice makes a righteous sound. All I hear is harmony.
